If all goes well at NCL, the currently well-received Seima no Kouseki won't be the only Fire Emblem to see release this year in Japan. The opening of their recent Touch DS! events has seen some new information on a variety of Nintendo games, not the least of which is a new GameCube Fire Emblem game.
The most interesting news is the way in which Intelligent Systems plans to solve the problem of difficulty. The GBA games have all seen a heavily reduced difficulty level from the earlier Fire Emblems, and IS wants to bring back both the insane toughness so famous in Japan from the last two SNES games and make it easy for newcomers and those who don't want the agony of the A.I. completely mopping the floor with them. Therefore, the game will have three selectable difficulty levels at the outset, in the same way as the newest Seima no Kouseki, but much more pronounced. Normal mode will be for people who just want to play a quickly progressing game. Hard mode will introduce a much tenser and more grinding level of do-or-die tactics. Maniac mode will finally bring back the series' extremely fiendish level of difficulty for those who really like to sink their teeth into hardcore decision making, perhaps a level of difficulty only Fire Emblem veterans will find welcoming, suggests IS.
Just as in the newest GBA games, skills will be making a comeback in the game, where they didn't feature in last year's hit. Whereas Seima no Kouseki only has a handful of them, they will be much expanded on the GameCube and be similar to the types of abilities that Japanese players have seen in the two latest SNES games. One instance of this lies in the hidden techniques, which, if a player decides to have their unit specialize, will result in them losing all previously learned skills for the chance to use powerful mega-attacks.
If you see a trend here, it's because in everything from graphics to size of battlefield to difficulty and options, this next installment seems to be ditching some of the streamlining changes made in the GBA trilogy to directly continue the line of evolution seen in the console versions.
Other upgrades see new beast and winged creature units who are able to transform in battle and a brand new command called, more or less, "push." The game's 3D battlefields will continue to see movement in a grid of squares, and the push command will allow one unit to push another exactly one square so that there will be further opportunity to protect units or get them into strategic positions with their varied movement ranges.
Still scheduled for winter, no release dates have been announced for the U.S. versions of either game, but North American gamers need not worry, as it's quite likely that such an announcement will come at next year's E3.
